The Anatomy of Melancholy

Another person’s opinion cannot make me happy. As Seneca aptly puts it, the man who does not consider himself happy is a miserable wretch, even if he rules a world. He is not happy if he thinks himself otherwise: what does it matter what your condition is, or seems to others, if you yourself dislike it?

It is a common human tendency to think well of other people’s fortunes and dislike our own: “Whoever admires another’s lot plainly hates his own.” But “how does it happen, Maecenas,” and so on—how does it come about, what causes it? Many people are so perverse that nothing pleases them, says Theodoret: neither riches nor poverty. They complain when well, and when ill; they grumble at every turn of fortune, in prosperity and adversity. They are troubled in a year of low prices and in a barren year, in plenty or scarcity. Nothing pleases them: war or peace, having children or having none.

For the most part this is the disposition of us all: discontented, miserable and profoundly unhappy—at least in our own opinion. Show me someone who is otherwise, or ever was! The Romans endlessly admire Quintus Metellus’s good fortune. As Paterculus says, scarcely anyone of any nation, rank, age or sex can be found whose happiness compares with his. In a word, he had “the goods of mind, body and fortune”—goods of mind, body and fortune; so did Publius Mucianus Crassus.

Lampsaca, the Spartan lady, was another such person in Pliny’s opinion: a king’s wife, a king’s mother, a king’s daughter. And everyone thought as highly of Polycrates of Samos. The Greeks boast of Socrates, Phocion and Aristides; the people of Psophis especially of their Aglaus, “happy throughout his life, immune to every danger”—which Pausanias, incidentally, held impossible. The Romans boast of Cato, Curius and Fabricius for their settled fortunes, withdrawn ways of life, command of their passions and contempt for worldly things. Yet none of them was happy or free from discontent: neither Metellus, Crassus nor Polycrates, who died violently, as did Cato. And how much evil Lactantius and Theodoret say of Socrates, a weak man—and likewise of the rest.

There is no contentment in this life. As he said, “All is vanity and vexation of spirit”—lame and imperfect. Even if you had Samson’s hair, Milo’s strength, Skanderbeg’s arm, Solomon’s wisdom, Absalom’s beauty, Croesus’s wealth, “Pases’s coin,” Caesar’s courage, Alexander’s spirit, Cicero’s or Demosthenes’s eloquence, Gyges’s ring, Perseus’s Pegasus and the Gorgon’s head, and Nestor’s years still to live, none of this would make you complete, give you contentment and true happiness in this life, or preserve them. Even amid all our mirth, merriment and laughter there is sorrow and grief; or, if true happiness exists among us, it lasts only a while—

A woman beautiful above ends in a fish below.